With Salesforce diving further into the Nonprofit space more customers will start to wonder where they should start. After some research for a client, I have some questions if you start with one and want to add on (as one trailhead explains) and the overall future of NPSP.
As we know NPSP does not support Person Accounts and uses Households and Relationships to track how contacts are related to organizations. This has been the foundation for Salesforce for Nonprofits but now we have Nonprofit cloud where users can use more core Salesforce features tailored to the Nonprofit community but this uses Person Accounts.
Nonprofits products and features trailhead - this trailhead states you can start with NPSP and add more products from the Nonprofit cloud package or you can start directly with Nonprofit cloud but that will include the NPSP package as well. But this confuses my understanding of the two products, the data model is different. NPSP does not use person accounts but Nonprofit Cloud does.
With all that background, my questions are as follows:
- How would NPSP work with Nonprofit Cloud since one uses person accounts and the other does not? And trailhead documentation states they work together.
- If the client decides on Nonprofit cloud are we locked into Person Accounts? (as you can't revert back once that is turned on)
- Is the recommendation to move away from NPSP and towards Nonprofit Cloud using person accounts? I have seen some comments and posts below that say Nonprofit Cloud may not be mature enough to trust at this time.
I may have misread some of the documentation that is out there but it really comes down to how these two products work together and what is the direction of NPSP?
I’m not at Salesforce, but I will respond as openly as I have information to do so.
At this time, the two products do not work together. Full stop. It’s absolutely one or the other right now. One could potentially ask for two different orgs but I cannot really imagine a good situation resulting.
If a customer at this time wants to adopt the newly released nonprofit cloud, it needs to be because they can focus exclusively on out-of-the-box functionality of salesforce and the existing functionality of the newly released nonprofit cloud (in my opinion primarily program management). At this time fundraising and volunteer capability is not even available for the newly released nonprofit cloud. So I suspect the ideal customer is someone who has a fundraising and volunteer solutions in place and wants to add program management now, as well as hopes to combine all their solutions onto the Salesforce platform over time.
Be aware that Salesforce likes to rename things, and has done so multiple times over the last three years in the nonprofit space. To make things worse, I have a license to something called a nonprofit Cloud, but it’s not the newly released nonprofit Cloud. Go figure! :( So probably there is a lot of documentation that still talks about the old products based on NPSP as the nonprofit cloud.
But fear not. I am convinced that the people at Salesforce nonprofit are smart and caring. Once they get some new customers for the newly announced nonprofit cloud under their belt, I feel certain that they will begin to focus on how to bring new functionality to their installed base. After all, if they do not, they’re installed base will dwindle and leave. (Hint hint, everybody… Please be listening at Salesforce!)
As an architect, I honestly believe we have tools at our disposal to resolve co-mingling and smooth migration. Once Salesforce is willing to put resources on this task (and they very clearly are not yet.) I do not believe that person accounts break NPSP any longer, but the data model would lose its understanding of household giving without additional migrated data. Data was in place, all the household giving would be present through the various relationship roll ups. I’ve never seen the newly announced nonprofit cloud product, so I can’t say whether it is capable of working with real accounts, as well as person accounts. If industries cloud has customized the standard Salesforce so much that it can’t work with normal apps that use a mix of accounts connected to contacts, this new direction is a terrible mistake and will flop. So I trust that it is capable. But only time will tell, and with Salesforce, that’s about six releases down the road.
